Stuart Kauffman

I picked up Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred at the bookstore today before heading off to see Splice. Splice was generally excellent and extremely disturbing, but not in any of the ways one might expect. Check out Shaviro’s blog for a discussion of the film and links to other discussions.

At any rate, I’m about forty pages into Kauffman’s book and am both enjoying it a great deal and getting a lot out of it. The book is tightly argued and does a lot to present a coherent account of “non-spooky” emergence that remains consistent with basic physics, while also showing how emergent organizations cannot be explained in terms of lower level laws but rather have level specific laws. In many respects, these arguments are crucial to both onticology and OOO insofar as both assert the autonomy of objects at all levels of scale, regardless of whether objects are composed of other objects. In other words, OOO vigorously defends emergence.

What I find less appealing in Kauffman’s book (and his other works) is his project of “reinventing the sacred”. On the one hand, I don’t see anything particularly sacred or divine in demonstrating that the universe is creative. Nor do I think there’s any reason to revere the particular laws that Kauffman believes he discovers in emergence. On the other hand, I think the new age sentiments that often inhabit Kauffman in some of his worst moments (fortunately you won’t find them omnipresent in his work) tend to undermine the overall credibility of his position and diminish the strength of his arguments. I really wish he’d drop this project and its accompanying rhetoric.

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3 Responses to “Stuart Kauffman”

I wish he’d drop the rhetoric, too. But he can’t, he needs it, in order to help make appear logical and necessary his claim that self-organizing complexity applies to the market, which should therefore be left to evolve freely, as well as to the biosphere (see ch. 11, if I remember correctly). He cares about this claim because he has lots of patents.

[I would reverse roles. Creativity existed before the universe emerged from it. The natu-ral laws are constraints, precisely as Kauffman says. Creativity subjects itself to these constraints and thereby produces the material universe. It becomes the force that creates and maintains material forms and thereby sets the stage for the adventure of evolution. What we call evolution is its gradual (and sometimes fairly sudden) emer-gence from its self-imprisonment in what appears to be an unconscious mechanical force. Like a cosmic Houdini it breaks free, transcends its constraints, revels in a frenzy of creative imagination, regains consciousness, revels in a frenzy of creative specula-tion, wondering what it all means.
It is, in fact, eminently plausible that the well-established laws of physics — the Stan-dard Model and General Relativity — are precisely the constraints needed to set the stage for the drama of evolution.2 If this is the case, then the laws of physics are under-lying only in this particular sense. Reviewed by U. Mohrhoff 144 ANTIMATTERS 2 (3) 2008http://antimatters.org/ojs/index.php?journal=am&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=83&path%5B%5D=76 ]

I agree. Kauffman clearly knows a great deal about things I know very little about and wish I knew more about. But I find his logic too flaky in places, just where it needs to be watertight in order to support his argument. As I read I kept veering from ‘so what?’ to ‘how did you get there?!’